Chairman of Trustees, Sian Rees, introduces this year of celebration with an invitation to read the views of members and friends about our Association and its work.
2021 succeeds 2020, which was possibly the most disrupted year for the Association since the Second World War, with our summer and autumn meetings and the Darganfod spring conference all cancelled. So far 2021 has been no better with lockdown continuing and friends and families affected terribly by the pandemic. Nonetheless, this year is the 175th anniversary of the Association and we want to mark the occasion with as much celebration as we can.
Our summer meeting in Lincoln, we are hopeful, will still go ahead, the Darganfod conference will be delivered to members free of charge in April on Zoom (registration is already open) and a conference to celebrate this anniversary, entitled ‘Illustrating the Past’, organised by Heather James, will take place in Llangollen in October. A new venture, a series of Walks and Talks in different parts of Wales, is planned for the summer.
We thought that, in addition to these events, it might be timely to celebrate our membership and consider how members contribute to the study and enjoyment of Wales’s past through the wide variety of measures that the Association organises and supports. Some of these are well known, others perhaps less so. I myself joined the Cambrians as a schoolgirl at the behest of my great aunts, Anne and Irene Rees, and it is certain that being a member encouraged me to study archaeology at University and then make my career looking after the historic environment of Wales.
Accordingly, I invited a number of members and friends to write short pieces about their experiences with our Association and our work that plays so important a part in the life of the study of Wales’s past. Please enjoy reading these varied views, light-hearted and scholarly, and please participate in our anniversary events as far as we are able to provide them. They can be downloaded from the link below.
The Cambrian Archaeological Association is 175 years old.